Monday, June 29, 2015

The Post SCOTUS Right WIng Meltown...

In the wake of Friday's historic US Supreme Court ruling, legalizing same sex marriage across all 50 states, the collective freak out on the social conservative right wing in the United States as been epic.  If you want a great recap of the assorted wailing and gnashing of teeth, by all means head over to Joe Jervis' brilliant  blog  JoeMyGod, for a recap.

My favourite though,  was the American Family Association's delightful spokes-bigot Bryan Fischer who managed to invoke  the death of Buddy Holly, Pearl Harbor, and the Attacks of September 11th during his colossal twitter meltdown.

I get a real kick out of all the Attack on Marriage" rhetoric.      Always when the  subject of equal rights for gay and lesbian couples is part of   our national discourse conservative evangelicals always claim it  is an "attack" on marriage and the family. So I decided to look   up the word `attack' in the dictionary. The Merriam-Webster   Online Dictionary defines it as:

Attack
Pronunciation: &-'tak
Function: verb
Etymology: Middle French attaquer, from (assumed) transitive senses.
1 : to set upon or work against forcefully
2 : to assail with unfriendly or bitter words
3 : to begin to affect or to act on injuriously
4 : to set to work on
5 : to threaten (a piece in chess) with immediate capture
intransitive senses : to make an attack
6: the act or action of setting upon with force or violence


 Hmmm… to set upon or work against forcefully huh? Ok, so if we take the arguments being shrieked on the Right seriously, The SCOTUS running last Friday giving gay couples the same rights as straight couples, not more rights, not any new rights that straight couples do not currently have, but only the exact same rights, is going to injure, damage and potentially even destroy heterosexual marriages and families.

Wow. I guess I only have one question then. How?  Does Marriage Equality marriage mean that straight couples have now lost any of the 1,100   federal benefits and protections that they had before last Friday? Does marriage equality now mean straight couples can’t file joint  tax returns, have, adopt or raise children, pass on social   security survivor benefits, or make medical decisions for each
other? Does the legalization of marriage for gays and lesbians   mean that straight people can no longer marry each other and instead must get “SCOTUS Gay Married"? Does it mean those who are presently  married must now get divorced? 

In other words; Have the marriages or families of any heterosexual changed in any way as a result of last Friday’s court decision? 

The answer is, no of course not.   But when faced with these facts , the right wing nuto-sphere spews back   three basic arguments. The first, is the claim that God says being gay is sinful because the bible say!  So Gays want to destroy Christianity.     So  how does that square with the fact that so many LGBT activists ARE Christian?  

Funny how people who say  the United States should be  theocracy where church rules the state are very selective in their piety.  Gay Marriage?  Hell No!   But divorce? No problem.   Yet the Bible says clearly that  divorce should be a criminal offense. ( The fifty percent of heterosexual couples that avail themselves of divorce I am sure are thankful this is not the case.)  Yet you never see  Bryan Fischer or any of his ilk truly following the bible they love to so selectively cite .  A fact brilliantly illustrated in a now famous scene from the TV series  "The West Wing".


The second response was  even more fun. An oldie but a goodie...  Allowing gay marriage  will now lead to polygamy, bestiality, pedophile marriages, and who knows what else. Yet civil marriage is and has only ever been   about two and ONLY two consenting adults of no direct family   relation.  Find me the person who truly wants to marry their dog,   and for that matter, find me a dog who is over 18 years old, can  read and then sign a marriage application and can then say the  words "I do". If Shaggy and Scoobie show up at the Vegas wedding chapel, then this argument might be worth taking seriously.

The third  response to last Friday's ruling  legalizing gay marriage is actually a bit   more honest on their part. Conservative evangelicals say that   gay marriage cheapens or lessens the value of the institution of  marriage in the eyes of society. But since none of the   marriage rights or benefits that straight couples enjoy have  changed now that same sex couples are able to marry, what opponents of equality are really saying is that letting gay couples marry cheapens their straight marriages in their eyes. Letting gays and lesbians get married means they now have a right that until Friday, only heterosexuals had. And that makes them mad.
 
It's not just  that these people are upset that LGBT Americans now have  equal marriage rights, they are upset that gays and lesbians have any rights at all.  They see equal rights for everyone as an attack on them.

That's interesting. Even though heterosexual marriage clearly  has not changed in ANY way, some people firmly believes that marriage  has now lost value, status and might even come to an end, because gay  couples are now able to marry. It suddenly occurred to me there is   another word for someone who is irrationally fixed on the   artificial preservation of inequality that they feel is in their
favor. Merriam-Webster's dictionary has the same word for it.

Bigot
Pronunciation: 'bi-g&t
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle French, hypocrite, bigot
1: a person obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own
opinions and prejudices


This small group of even smaller minds, are angry about losing  what they feel is superiority that is due them. They want to take their religious beliefs and codify them into civil law, then force them on the rest of us. The fact that the US Supreme Court said no, has caused many of them to lose their minds.

 

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